


On the Border

by Thimblerig



Series: Musketeer Shorts [17]
Category: The Musketeers (2014)
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Physical hurt/comfort, Scenes from a war
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-09
Updated: 2018-06-02
Packaged: 2019-03-29 01:56:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,424
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13916913
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Thimblerig/pseuds/Thimblerig
Summary: Chapter 1:The border between France and the Spanish Netherlands was a shifting thing, defined more by weekly troop placements than anything so ephemeral as a printed map...A soldier and a monk, in the places between.Chapter 2:On the border of sleeping and waking, Porthos watched the both of them: the curve of her hand, the rise and fall of the man’s breathing.His eyes shut.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Chapter 1 set maybe a year before the start of s3.

The trouble with a fever, was that you were always too cold ‘cept when you were too hot and there was no choosing between them. So even if you got your hands on a blanket, it was usually a pest and an annoyance.

Porthos explained that to the Spanish monk, who agreed with him politely, then, his hands on Porthos’ arse, suggested that he get up in the saddle and they’d work out the blanket later. “One, two, three, _up._ I meant up and not sideways, Porthos, let’s try that again. One, two, three, _up,_ there you go, well done.”

Swaying in the high packsaddle of a fine brown mule, Porthos squinted warily at the monk. “When did I tell you my name was ‘Porthos’?” he asked.

“A while back,” said the monk. He looked up at Porthos, all high Spanish cheekbones and sparking black eyes, a moustache and beard tended as neatly as a topiary… “Oh dear,” he added, “you _are_ in a bad way. I shall let you rest soon, I promise, but there is a raiding party coming through and they would not be kind to a Frenchman.”

Songbirds threw liquid honey song overhead, hidden in the green of the tall trees on either side of the dirt road, glorying in the quiet summer day. Already by the pine tree he’d been sitting against - just resting, just catching his breath around the pain in his side, having a bit of a think about how to rejoin his unit and get back to France’s side of the border - the earth had been brushed and tidied, the bulk of his armour disappeared under heavy piles of fallen branches, as if Porthos had never been there at all.

“Why are you helping me?”

“You’re my brother,” the monk replied shortly.

“Monk stuff.”

"Not to put too fine a point on it,” the man said, tugging the mule’s lead rope, “I’m not a monk. Having sworn no vows, technically speaking I am a lay-brother. And on this side of the border my name is Renato.” The mule’s long, sensitive ears swivelled, and it began reluctantly to move. Porthos swayed with it, far from the ground.

“It’s not fair that you look like Aramis.”

 _“Me llamo Renato._ Re-na-to.”

“Renaaaaaato,” Porthos repeated. “Why do you look like Aramis, Brother Renato?”

“I cannot help the face God granted me.”

 

**

 

 _“Your man could carry the mule!”_ Renato heard from further along the road, as a small troop of soldiers on horseback paced under the luxuriant trees.

 _“Eh, he’s sick,”_ Renato explained. He glanced back anxiously at the big man on his mule Hilarion’s high packsaddle, dozing fretfully under a blanket, and bit his lip. _“I don’t think he’s infectious,”_ he answered doubtfully.

The Captain of the troop, a sober, bearded man with high cheekbones and blue eyes brilliant against his tan, who had been eying the strength of the mule - and the man - with acquisitive favour, noted also the reddened pustules on Porthos’ flushed cheeks and let his fine black-legged grey sidle back slightly. _“And you are?”_

 _“Looking for medicinal herbs, Capitan,”_ answered Renato, cheering up. _“Try as I might, I cannot get vervain to grow in my herb-garden. And, you know, other things.”_

 _“That’s only Renato,”_ said a young soldier from behind. _“He comes around, he gathers the herbs, he does a little buying and selling, he sets the bones…”_ He shrugged. _“He does holy work, as a man of God.”_

 _“That’s never Fillipo?”_ Renato leaned to the side that he might see past the Captain and smiled in delight. _“All is well with the - the uh - down there…?”_

 _“Oh yes,”_ the baby-faced soldier replied, _“The, uh, it is almost gone, just as you said.”_

_“But your dear friend Esteban, I do not see him.”_

The young soldier spat. _“The French pigs.”_

Renato’s face fell, and he crossed himself. _“I feel it.”_

_“It is war.”_

_“Have you seen any soldiers, Father?”_ the Captain asked.

 _“Actually, I’m just a lay-brother,”_ Renato answered, smiling from the shadows of his cowl.

_“Brother, then. Have you seen soldiers?”_

_“Yes.”_

_“When?”_

_“Today.”_ At this the troop sharpened, as hunting dogs finding a scent, but their Captain raised one gloved hand.

_“When today, and where, Brother?”_

Renato blinked mildly, scratching, seemingly unconsciously, at the back of his neck. _“Here, Capitan. Now.”_

The men behind the Captain snickered, and he, in a replete mood after a good meal and better wine at a nearby inn, spared Renato a small smile. _“Then peace find you, Brother.”_

 _“Ah, my friend, if I found peace then where would the war go?”_ Renato called, tugging the mule carefully around the troop of men. The tall beast’s burden had the grace to stay silent, the big man huddled half-asleep under the scratchy grey blanket. The Spanish soldiers edged to the side themselves, respectful of a man of God, and also, the sickness.

 _“Me llamo Renato,”_ Porthos muttered to himself when they were far enough away from the soldiers that the birds had resumed their song, and repeated it several times, relishing the half-rhyme. _“Me llaaaaaaamo Renaaaaaato.”_ Then he giggled. One of the pustules on his face, a concoction of chewed bread encarnadined with berry juice, fell off. Porthos scratched at another with his forefinger.

“One day you might regret remembering this,” Renato muttered quietly, hurrying them along. “And I shall enjoy reminding you.” Then he bit his tongue and walked faster.

 

**

 

“See, now I know you aren’t Aramis. He never used a mortar and pestle, he just chewed his yarrow straight off the plant.”

The monk looked pointedly at the polished oak mortar in his hands, its bowl near as big as a wash basin, and suggested that such things did not easily lend themselves to transportation on a soldier’s belt.

“Exactly,” Porthos insisted. “Aramis would never.”

Renato rolled his eyes and, scooping a poultice of soggy bread and crushed herbs into a wrap of light cheesecloth, he gently applied it to the open wound in Porthos’ side.

“Ow…”

“You big baby,” Renato told him. “Strive for the forbearance under physick of a five-year-old girl, eh?”

“No needlework?”

“We’ve been over this, it needs to drain first.”

“Aramis would -”

The monk stood suddenly and cast his outer robe over the soldier, and urged him gently onto a pallet of cut pine-boughs. He tested the heat of Porthos’ fever with his inner wrist against the man’s forehead and frowned. “At least you’re not watching the purple rabbits again,” he said thoughtfully. “Sleep if you can.” He picked up the blanket and made to drape that over Porthos as well.

“The hell you will,” said Porthos, his eyes slitting even as he shivered. “Flimsy man of God like you’ll freeze in the night.”

“I’m not so flimsy as all that,” Renato said with asperity. But Porthos’ mouth tightened. Hilarion the mule, lipping at a mash of grain at the bottom of his nosebag, wisely did not intrude on the discussion.

“Fine then,” said the monk. “We’ll follow St Martin’s example.” He nicked the edge of the blanket, then ripped it in two, like Martin the soldier dividing his cloak to keep a beggar warm. “How can you argue with that, my big fine army man?” And he stalked to the other side of their little fire.

“You’re right,” Porthos told him, watching him clean the mortar with sand and irritated swipes of his hand. “I am an army man. I can’t leave.”

The monk’s hands stilled.

“I can't leave the army. All I know how to do is fight. And if I don't remind them what I'm worth, if I don't show the strength of my arm they'll find a way to throw me away. I know they will. ‘Cause they want me to be less’n them, right? They're always looking for a way. So I fight for glory, a big fat cock on the dungheap, and under the swagger it's all filth, and _disease,_ and people are dying.

“Charon knew that,” he told the Spanish monk earnestly. “He knew about the muck under the tinsel. But ‘Some things change, not brotherhood,’ that's what he said.”

“I believe you,” the monk said softly.

“Will you kill me too, brother?”

The sound the monk made then was almost exactly like a man who’d had a knife planted between his ribs, a soft outrush of breath.

“Sorry, sorry,” Porthos said then. “I'm just sad.” Then, “I will never forget,” he said into the summer evening, “that when it came down to it, he kept it all a secret. From me! He didn’t trust _me_ to guard his back. How can I forget that?” he asked the monk plaintively. “How can I forget that he walked away?”

Renato didn’t ask who. Setting a chunk of splintery, resinous wood into the hottest part of the coals, he said, “Perhaps, perhaps he was done drawing danger down onto his friends as a metal rod does lightning. Perhaps he was tired, or lost in guilt and grief. Maybe it was as simple as keeping a vow to God.” He tucked the wood more firmly into the heat. “Men often don’t know _why,_ not until a long time after.”

“He left me.”

“Go to sleep, Porthos. We cross the border tomorrow.”

“Why?”

“Hush.”

 

**

 

“... No, Adele is the tall one, brown-haired girl, very motherly; it’s _Marie_ who wants to be a wandering hero when she grows up. She’s tiny, blonde as butter, and laughs in the face of danger. ‘Though she be but little, she is fierce…’ “

The border between France and the Spanish Netherlands was a shifting thing, defined more by weekly troop placements than anything so ephemeral as a printed map. Aramis could see, on the edge of the trees, a field of bright green grass rising up to the brow of a low hill. According to the latest gossip he’d picked up from wandering pedlars, and soldiers, and people fleeing the war, the French camp would be on the other side of the hill. He could not see the pickets but he did not expect to. Clever men would obscure themselves against the scraps of low brush dotted along the hillside, or against the burned and ruined windmill on the brow - why make yourself a target?

Quiet it was in this place, and green.

“Could we just keep travelling, Renato?” Porthos asked drowsily. “Could we just not touch the war again?”

“Where would we go to escape it?” Aramis said seriously. “If you’ve a place in mind, please let me know. And on _this_ side of the border it’s alright to call me -”

“Oi!” came a cry from the hill. “Who goes there?”

 _“¡Hola!”_ Aramis cried with automatic cheerfulness, then bit his tongue. He’d been switching from French to Spanish and back so much of late that they were tangling on his tongue.

“What d’ye want, then?” the French soldier shouted back, suspicion enriching his voice. “You a trader? Got fresh food, then, yum yum?”

Aramis took a breath and called, in careful French, “I’m bringing back one of your men! He’s hurt!”

“You want something for him then? Ransom?”

Shaking his head, Aramis replied, “I’m just helping a brother.”

From the hill, but lower, “Takes all kinds.” With the snap of command: “Alright, Henri, Michel, bring ‘em in!”

A glint of metal, then, on a musket barrel, but closer, from a man stationed in a blind in the woods. That also was a good place to set a scout… Aramis cursed to himself.

The forest scout and - his brother, by the colouring - grinned, gaptoothed, and added, “Our thanks also for the donation of your mule, Father.”

“I’m only a lay-brother,” Aramis replied automatically. His hand tightened on Hilarion’s lead rope. There were very few decent animals left to his little stony monastery.

“Thank you, Brother.” Aramis hid the curl of his lip under a peaceful smile. There was a time he could have killed the both of them from where he stood, if he’d wanted to, if there was need. There was a time no foot-soldier would have dreamed of this kind of impertinence, not to him.

Aramis had left his gift for violence behind, with all the other things. He -

Porthos lifted his leg and slid from the mule’s saddle with an awesome gravity and landed on both feet, if unsteadily. “Bye bye Hilarion,” he told the mule fondly then, with his own bark of command, ordered Henri and Michel to _snap_ to it and help him to camp. Automatically, without thought, the pair of scouts straightened and moved to steady him.

“Wait!” Aramis said.

He could go with Porthos, and make sure he healed in the miasma of the camp. He could do that. It was responsible, and kind. He _should_ do that.

And he was already two days late on a not strictly authorised scouting trip from his little monastery. The children would already be missing him; his brothers would expect him; they needed the supplies he scavenged, and the information he gleaned.

Athos might be there, and the young Gascon, he could see them…

Aramis dug into the pack on Hilarion’s back. “I saved his pauldron,” he told Henri, tossing the scout a bundle of the heavily ornamented piece of shoulder armour wrapped in half a blanket. “It will stay with him _or God will know.”_ The scout nodded, chastened.

Rope in hand, he turned back into the woods.

 

**

 

Porthos cracked one eye open, then the other. Dingy cream canvas swayed above him, and he could hear the creaking of tent-ropes and past that the bawl and bustle of a military camp.

“I’m hungry,” he said. His head felt very heavy on the hard flat pillow on which it rested.

Athos' pale face loomed over him, the rain-coloured eyes ringed about with shadow. His solemn mouth curled at one corner. “I think we can do something about that,” the Musketeer Captain said. Porthos blinked again and Athos looked abashed but still rested the inside of his wrist against Porthos’ forehead, to feel the heat. He hummed to himself, then took his wrist away.

“How long have I been out?” Porthos asked, throat very dry.

“You’ve been slipping in and out of the fever for two days. You were away from the army perhaps a week before that.”

“So long.”

Another slow smile curled at Athos’ mouth. “A lot of eating to catch up on, then.”

Porthos yawned widely, tired again. “I could eat Hilarion.” Athos blinked. “The mule,” Porthos tried to explain around the fuzziness of disordered and feverish recollection. “He brought me back to the army.”

“A mule brought you back...”

“No, a mule carried me, it was the monk. Spanish. He was nice.”

“I shall thank him in my prayers.” Athos fell silent.

“Athos -”

“I thought we’d lost you,” the Musketeer Captain said hoarsely, watching Porthos’ face as a man in a desert might watch an unexpected cup of water.

“Nah,” said Porthos, pasting on a grin. “You know me, I’m like a bad smell. I’ll never stay away from the army.”

Athos caught the back of his neck and, very tenderly, kissed Porthos’ forehead.

“Welcome home, brother.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> // _“Me llamo Renato”_ \- “I call myself Renato.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Guess who couldn't sleep last night?
> 
>  
> 
> // Set between 3.03 Brothers in Arms and 3.04 The Queen’s Diamonds. This also directly follows the sickroom scene in my story “After Midnight”. (https://archiveofourown.org/works/14294925)
> 
> // Please forgive the Google Translate Spanish - if there’s a better way of phrasing it, I am humbly open to correction.

Madame d’Artagnan was a magnificent woman - it was a glory to see her striding around the rough and masculine barracks with a swinging stride, her head held high and the sun striking fire out of her hair. Porthos wouldn’t say that she’d blossomed, exactly, from the demure housewife that yearned for adventure behind downcast eyes… more that the down had fallen out and the pinfeathers grown in, and a mature falcon glided over her territory, serene in flight and fierce in stooping.  
  
But tonight she bustled softly, gentle as a mother hen around a dozen feeble little chicks as the rain drummed down on the infirmary roof.  
  
”Where's Aramis?” 

Constance tenderly stroked Porthos’ forehead. “Sleeping,” she assured him. 

 _Around,_ he finished silently, and blinked against the prickle in his eyes, silly as a child with the relics of sickness. Aramis didn't owe him anything, he'd already made that clear: the wind blew cold across Porthos’ back. “Who's the lucky lady?” he rasped.

 Constance frowned, wrinkles showing in her creamy forehead, the shadows under her eyes deepening. “Sorry, Aramis wouldn't tell you something like that. Loves his _discretion,”_ Porthos added bitterly.

 Her mouth quirked. “When you're better, we're going to have a talk, Lieutenant du Vallon,” she said firmly, and he watched her walk away with a snap to her step, bending over each fallen cadet or soldier to check on them with brisk, motherly hands. She stopped at the far end of the long, narrow room, at a single bed squeezed in next to a barrel, and touched the shoulder of a sleeping man, all that could be seen of him a grubby shirt under the blanket and a mop of dark hair.

 On the border of sleeping and waking, Porthos watched the both of them: the curve of her hand, the rise and fall of the man’s breathing.

 His eyes shut.

  
  
**  
  
  
It was later in the night that he woke, scratchy with fading fever, wrung out like a dirty dish-rag. Constance was nowhere. The far bed had been shoved closer in an awkward slant that only partly cleared the sickroom door.  
  
The man in it turned over - Aramis, grey with fatigue. And didn’t Porthos feel the proper idiot now? Constance must have been laughing at him behind the frown. Porthos swallowed back the surge of irritation. (He was so… he was so _tired_ of being angry.)  
  
An impudent rooster crowed against the rain and the man stirred irritably, dragging a fold of blanket over his head like a hood. The shadows of it stirred Porthos’ own irritable recollection, of a garrulous monk on the wrong side of the Franco-Spanish border, who reminded him so painfully of an old friend but couldn’t possibly _be,_ who called himself…  
  
“Renato.”  
  
Aramis’ eyes opened. “ _Qué?”_ he asked.  
  
“Did you eat Hilarion?” Porthos asked seriously. He’d liked the mule.  
  
_“Hilarion es ahora un padre orgulloso, de una cabra, dos ovejas y una bandada de patitos…”_  
  
“French, Aramis.”  
  
A slow blink. “We don’t tell him.”  
  
“That the mule isn’t really their dad?”  
  
“We don’t tell Porthos.”  
  
“You utter bastard.”  
  
“But I was loved,” Aramis told him. “We don’t tell Porthos.”  
  
“Sure you do,” Porthos said easily, his voice coming back to him even if his strength did not.  
  
Aramis lifted a finger to his lips, solemn as a child. Porthos tsked.  
  
“I’m not Porthos,” he assured the other man. “I’m just a dream. You can tell a dream anything you like, yeah?” He watched Aramis’ eyes absorb that, soft and liquid with the knowledge.  
  
Hadn’t he talked to Aramis for hours, trapped under a Spanish fort in Alsace? The ghost of the marksman had been a comfort: witty, wry, and tender. But he’d always gone when the torturers came. And Porthos survived. (And _damn_ Athos for reminding him of it, just,  _damn the man.)_  
  
“Why don’t you tell Porthos, then?” he asked, keeping his voice low and soothing, a comforting wheedle.  
  
“Because he’s angry, and it hurt, and I didn’t want to lose it.”  
  
“See, when Porthos is angry,” he tried to explain, “you know he cares.”  
  
Aramis just looked at him in answer, unutterably weary.  
  
Deeper in the room someone coughed, one of the cadets, Porthos thought. Again, a rooster crowed. The coughing shifted to a grumbling, and a shuffling as the boy turned in his blankets, and sighed. Porthos and Aramis relaxed.  
  
“What happened at Alsace?” Aramis asked suddenly, drowsy eyes sharpening.  
  
_“Nothing,”_ Porthos growled. (Fire and darkness and a throat gone to shreds with screaming.) “Nothing that matters.”  
  
Aramis’ eyes closed, for such a long time that Porthos wondered if he slept again.  
  
Then, “I have no right to his forgiveness.”  
  
But he wanted it, didn’t he? Not that he’d work for it, no, just mope around looking sad - Porthos cut off that thought savagely. “Have you tried asking?”  
  
“How do I do that? Porthos doesn’t want me,” Aramis said slowly. “He wants the man he thought he knew, back when he was happy.”  
  
“He wants you. He’s trying. It hurts.”  
  
Aramis’ eyes closed, in acknowledgement, opened, closed again.  
  
The beds were close enough - Porthos hooked his great hand around the back of his friend’s neck and hauled him close to kiss his forehead. And he prayed, on the border of night and day, that Aramis would be there when the sun was high.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> // _Hilarion es ahora un padre orgulloso, de una cabra, dos ovejas y una bandada de patitos._ \- “Hilarion is now a proud father, of a goat, two sheep, and a flock of ducklings.”


End file.
